NEW YORK, NY - DECEMBER 07: Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt arrives at Trump Tower on December 7, 2016 in New York City. Potential members of President-elect Donald Trump's cabinet have been meeting with him and his transition team of the last few weeks. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)Getty Images

On Friday, the Senate confirmed Scott Pruitt as the administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency, the New York Times reports. According to the New York Times, the party-line crossing vote came to 52-46, wherein one Republican senator voted against Pruitt, while two Democratic senators voted for him.

At the beginning of December, Donald Trump’s senior advisor Kellyanne Conway, announced that the president-elect selected Scott Pruitt to be the next Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator.

The EPA was established in 1970 for the express purpose of protecting our environment, both nationally and globally, and human health. “It...has jurisdiction over all the laws that clean up our air, clean up our water, [and] clean up our contaminated lands,” Marty Hayden, vice president of policy and legislation at Earthjustice, tells Teen Vogue. The agency is responsible for enforcing legislation like the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Air Act, as well as hazardous waste clean-up laws and some pesticide laws, according to Hayden. “EPA supports our life support system,” he says. “It’s the agency that’s literally responsible for protecting the air we breathe and the water we drink.”

As EPA Administrator, Pruitt will serve as the country’s top environmental official, in charge of all of those things. So, who exactly is Trump placing in charge of some of our most basic human needs? Let’s find out.

1. He’s the Attorney General of Oklahoma. He started his term in 2010, and is only the second Republican ever to serve as Oklahoma’s Attorney General, and spent two terms as the Republican Attorneys General Association president. Before that, he served as a state senator and the assistant Republican floor leader. And prior to his career in politics, Pruitt worked as a lawyer (with a law degree from the University of Tulsa).

2. He’s a climate-change skeptic. Despite the overwhelming scientific evidence proving the realities and dangers of climate change, there are still people who refuse to accept (or admit) the truth. President-elect Donald Trump is one of those people (and the only world leader to deny the reality of climate change). Pruitt is another. In an op-ed published earlier this year in the National Review, Pruitt (along with Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange, who co-wrote the piece) stated that the climate change “debate is far from settled,” framed climate change as little more than Democratic political agenda, and defended “oil and gas companies that have disputed the science behind man-made global warming.”

3. He’s a true friend of oil and gas. In his six years as Oklahoma’s Attorney General, Pruitt has worked tirelessly on behalf of oil and gas lobbyists, pushing for legislation that would protect their interests and their bank accounts — as well as his own. And since 2002, he’s received nearly $340,000 in campaign contributions from the fossil fuel industry, according toTime. When he was up for reelection in 2014, Politicoreports that about 14% of his total fundraising dollars ($114,000) came from energy company PACs and executives, and he received donations from many other gas and oil companies and lobbyists as well.

“Mr. Pruitt has spent his time as Attorney General carrying Big Oil and King Coal’s water at every opportunity,” Hayden says. “It is a scary proposition that he may now get to do the same as the EPA Administrator, where the air our children breathe and the water they drink are on the line.”

Advertisement

4. He once signed and submitted a letter to the EPA that was written by a major energy company. In 2011, Pruitt (as Oklahoma Attorney General) submitted an official letter to the EPA stating that federal regulations had put an unnecessary hardship on oil and gas companies, and that the EPA was “significantly overestimating” natural gas emissions created by them. But, as the New York Timesdiscovered, the letter was actually written by one of Oklahoma’s biggest oil and gas companies, Devon Energy, delivered to Pruitt by Devon’s chief lobbyist, and then re-written on Pruitt’s letterhead and signed with his name. The email exchange between Pruitt’s office and Devon Energy, printed by the New York Times was clear evidence of Pruitt’s mutually beneficial relationship with energy companies like Devon. “He’s been so cozy with polluter lobbyists that he let them draft comments about federal pollution limits, changed a few words, then copied it onto his official Oklahoma Attorney General stationary and submitted it as the comments of the people of Oklahoma,” Earthjustice president Trip Van Noppen wrote in a statement.

5. He’s brought multiple lawsuits against the EPA. Pruitt hasn’t just spoken out against the agency he’ll now be in charge of; he’s actually sued the agency. He’s joined forces with other attorneys general to sue the EPA over regulations to cut methane (an extremely harmful greenhouse gas, which Hayden says is “many times more potent than carbon dioxide”) emissions, and over President Obama’s Clean Power Plan; the latter lawsuit is currently awaiting a decision in federal court.

The fact that Pruitt is an attorney (he’ll be the second one ever to serve as EPA Administrator, after John S. Herrington during the Reagan administration), who has already spent time formally fighting against the EPA and dispensing his beliefs that the agency is acting illegally, is one that that’s disturbing, to say the least. And, it could mean he’s more even dangerous than Myron Ebell, a top climate-change skeptic who has been leading the EPA transition. “While Pruitt’s been [fighting climate-change regulations] for less time [than Ebell]...he’s been doing it as the attorney general of a state,” Hayden says. “He’s been taking affirmative action against the combatting climate change, against combatting air pollution from oil and gas rigs, against cleaning up pollution in some of our most pristine areas, ...and he’s opposed [classifying the lesser prairie chicken] as an endangered species because of its potential impacts to oil and gas. [...] To have someone who, as an attorney general, is antithetically opposed to the very kinds of protection that the EPA is there to provide, run the agency is very scary.”

Ken Cook, the founder and president of the Environmental Working Group (EWG) is equally concerned. “The reason we have the clean air [and] clean water we have now — not that it’s perfect — is because there are people running the EPA who really [think] their job [is] to protect the environment, like the agency name indicates,” he tells Teen Vogue. “But I’m afraid this appointment is going to be one of the few in the history of environmental protection in this country where you have someone coming in who doesn’t believe in the agency mission [and] doesn’t believe that they’re operating within the law, that they’re breaking the law by cracking down on solutions. And that’s going to have a serious impact on our air and our water.”

6. He’s a proud adversary of President Obama. The first two sentences of Pruitt’s bio on his own website are quotes from Conservative columnist George Will and The Economist magazine stating, respectively, “one of the Obama administration’s most tenacious tormentors” and, “Barack Obama has no more committed adversary than Scott Pruitt.” In addition to his lawsuits against the Obama administration’s climate regulations, Pruitt has used his position as a state attorney general to fight Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, and DAPA, among other things.

Advertisement

7. He believes the EPA’s role should be minimized.Timereports that Pruitt believes environmental protection issues should be handled at the state level. And on his LinkedIn page, he touts his experience as a “leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda.” It seems counterintuitive that the person who will be leading the EPA doesn’t want it to hold much power. Then again, as Cook points out, if you’re the EPA administrator, “you don’t have to bother with suing the agency, you can just make the decisions you think the agency should’ve been making all along to not enforce environmental law.”

The good news is that neither Trump nor Pruitt can easily abolish the EPA, or undo all of the laws that have been put in place during the Obama administration. “All of the environmental laws [that have passed in the last eight years] are laws passed by Congress that delegate the authority to control clean air, air pollution, water pollution, etc, to the EPA,” Hayden says. “So...in order to really get rid of the EPA, you’d have to get rid of all [of those laws], and that’s not possible.” But, Hayden notes, they could “starve” the EPA of important funding. “[They] may not be able to abolish the EPA, but [Trump] and the GOP Congress together could do harm budgetarily [and] cut programs for drinking water, clean air, [and more],” Hayden says. And considering the EPA’s entire point is to protect those things, it’s an unsettling possibility, for sure.

“I’m very disappointed in the President-elect in picking someone who has been the leader of efforts by states and by the fossil fuel industry in stopping environmental law,” Cook says. “I think [it’s] deeply disturbing that we might have someone running the environmental protection agency who thinks that we’ve done way too much to protect the environment and should be doing a lot less.”

Whatever Pruitt’s plan, organizations like EWG and Earthjustice are prepared to fight. “When...the Trump administration tries to undo good things that have been done, and when they try to do new bad things, new harmful things, where that’ll end up is in court,” Hayden says. “And we’ll be there to meet him.”

As Hayden notes, "anyone who drinks water, anyone who breathes air, should be concerned [with] the future of the EPA." If you want to help in the efforts to protect our environment, you can donate to Earthjustice, EWG, or other environmental protection organizations, and look for ways to get and stay informed, and possibly even volunteer your time or services. And, keep in mind that the Senate has to confirm Pruitt’s appointment with a vote; so, if you want your voice to be heard, contact your Senator and tell him or her how you feel.